How Women Won the Vote: The Political Successes of the State Suffrage Movements, 1866-1920

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This is a study of the conditions under which a social movement is able to overcome powerful opposition to bring about significant political change. It will examine the state-level women's suffrage movements in the decades before and after the turn of the century to understand the circumstances in which movements are successful. In 1869 Wyoming was the first state (then a territory) to grant women suffrage. By 1920 when the l9th amendment was ratified, 33 states had enacted laws giving women one or more forms of partial suffrage, such as the right to vote in presidential or municipal elections, and 15 states (some of which had already enacted partial suffrage) had granted women full suffrage. The primary goal in studying the state suffrage movements is to develop and empirically test a theoretical model of social movement success. Rarely have researchers examined the conditions that lead to movement success defined in terms of political outcomes (as opposed to mobilization or cultural outcomes). For the state suffrage campaigns, political success was the expansion of the vote to women. The theoretical framework combines theories of movement mobilization with theories of the state, hypothesizing that the ability of the suffragists to bring about political change was shaped both by the movements' abilities to mobilize resources and by the social structural opportunities they confronted. Resource mobilization theory suggests that movement success stems from the ability of movement participants to mobilize key resources, including organizations and types of ideologies and strategies. The political process model of movement mobilization suggests that political opportunity structures influence movement effectiveness. Researchers, however, have typically interpreted political opportunity structures to encompass only the effect of actual political structures and processes (e.g., the openness of the polity or electoral instability) on the decisions of state actors to grant the demands of move ments. This research draws from various strands of theories of the state to expand the notion of opportunity structures, theorizing that gendered, economic, and racial opportunity structures also importantly influence the ability of movements to bring about political change. It combines social movement theory and theories of the state to explain social movement success. This study employs quantitative methods to test the empirical validity of the theoretical model. Event history analysis permits comparison of the state movements and the state contexts in which they operated to explain why some movements failed and others succeeded. Other methods, such as qualitative comparative analysis and recursive regressions, will also be employed to explore the complexities and robustness of the results. The state movements exhibit theoretically important variation (e.g., in terms of organization, strategies, and ideologies), and the contexts in which they operated also vary (e.g., concerning party politics and cultural and economic opposition), thus offering the opportunity for comparative analysis of multiple movements working toward the same general goal, women's suffrage. This historical study will contribute to our understanding of the development of American democracy, and thus will be of value to teachers and students, especially to those who are interested in women's history. However, the scientific results will have much broader value, improving formal models of the success and failure of political movements in general, including modern ones.